When I Hear Bread Breaking

Abstract

This reflection explores the Eucharist as an act of theological attention shaped by desire, embodiment, and divine grace. Taking Sister Corita Kent’s image of “hearing bread breaking” as a starting point, it argues that the Eucharist reveals how God’s reconciling love “gets inside humans,” refashioning desire and re-tuning the church’s imagination. Drawing on Daniel W. Hardy’s claim that the church is “measured” by Scripture and Eucharist, and read through Willie James Jennings’s commentary on Acts, the essay traces three scenes—Peter and Cornelius’s shared hunger, Lydia’s household as a Spirit-formed cell, and the Ethiopian eunuch’s baptismal floating—to show how the Spirit reconfigures boundaries of holiness, power, and belonging. Eucharist and baptism emerge as intertwined practices of liberation, measuring the church not by success but by participation in God’s reconciling movement. Hearing bread break becomes a way of perceiving grace that transforms bodies, households, and hopes for the world.